Looking Into The Future

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. The delay in postings is related to my growing frustration with Blogspot's apparent inability to handle the posting of pictures. Changes may be coming soon that will address the problem, but I don't want to say too much about that right now. For the time being, we're going to stick with everyone's favorite, the dense, text-heavy rant. Horray!

Spring invariably brings out the latent environmentalism in me. If you're the same way, here's something you should read and watch: It's a chilling piece from last week's 60 Minutes that focuses on the realities of global warming, and the Orwellian lengths to which the U.S. government is prepared to go to dampen, obfuscate and suppress scientific information relating to climate change when that information might make things uncomfortable for fossil fuel industries.

The piece focuses on James Hansen, NASA's top climate researcher and maybe the world's leading authority on global warming. Hansen says global warming is actually accelerating, as evidenced by the increasingly rapid melting of arctic and Antarctic ice. What's more, he says there's no doubt that humanity's burning of fossil fuels and pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are behind the rapid change. He says the "speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface", and that a reduction in greenhouse gas emission must be achieved soon or global warming will reach a tipping point and become unstoppable.

Is Hansen right? I'm not a scientist and I can't offer a meaningful opinion as to whether or not he has all the details correct. But the assessment he presents us with is sobering indeed, and the conclusion that the climate is changing and that human activity is at the root of these changes is the consensus reached by every scientist spoken to by 60 Minutes.

But what's even more terrifying to me than the environmental damage being done to this planet are the tactics taken by the government to filter or even suppress the information given to us by Hansen and others in order to achieve their own short-term political goals. Basically, the federal government and the corporate forces that have so much influence over it have realized that they need not disprove that dangers to the climate exist; rather, all they really need to do is selectively cobble together enough vagaries to allow them to shrug their shoulders and say "well, there's really no way to be 100% sure what's happening, so we don't actually need to do anything." Says Hansen, "I find a willingness to listen only to those portions of scientific results that fit predetermined inflexible positions. This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster."

The methods of this government are insidious when it comes to downplaying and distorting vitally important long-term environmental issues; they create ambiguity where it doesn't really exist in order to confuse the issue and protect polluters at great risk to the future well-being of the entire planet. Here's an example provided by Rick Piltz, who co-wrote reports for the federal Climate Change Science Program and was also interviewed for the piece.

"The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can't even being to discuss impacts and response strategies," says Piltz. "There's too much uncertainty. It's not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians."

Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet."

Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.

Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality."

Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney."

Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.

Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.

"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout."

Sadly, this is the state of government-sponsored environmental research in America today. The work of real scientists is being re-written by petroleum industry lobbyists to suit their agenda.

The realities of climate change are frightening enough, but if you really want to scare yourself check out the prognostications of the Peak Oil advocates in this piece from Salon. Not only is our unchecked gluttony for oil damaging the global environment, but there is quite a number of people who have come to the conclusion that we are burning through this finite resource at such a rate that we will reach the peak of global production in the next few years (and a few believe we've already passed it) and that the increasing scarcity of oil in the coming decades will lead to a gradual crumbling of our exorbitant lifestyle as everything from convenient travel to cheap food slowly disappears and domestic and international instability increases. Some go as far as to predict an outright return to the 13th Century. Of course Peak Oil theory has it's debunkers, and to be honest a lot of its serious doomsday-proponents remind me just a bit of the people who got hysterical about Y2K. Still, they bring up an important point--whether we will reach oil's peak of production in 5 years or 50 years, oil is a finite resource and will, one day, start to dry up. Simply assuming that technology and ingenuity will solve the problem and save our extravegant lifestyles seems naive and shortsighted.

The people that run this country give lip service to breaking our "addiction" to oil, but they do nothing to address the problem (although I guess they did send an army to conquer the second most oil-rich country in the world, but I'm told that was just done to spread freedom and liberty). In a sad--or lucky, I guess, depending on how you look at it--twist of fate, I doubt it will be this generation that pays the full price for our petrolium addiction, and if our children are fortunate they may not suffer serious consequences either. But I think it's very likely that one day the people of America, along with the rest of the world, will pay a dear price for our addiction in the form of instability and war over resources, shortages of basic necessities and a damaged environment. My hunch is that they'll look back at us and wonder how we could have possibly been so myopic.